“Indispensable Wisdom on the Pavement”: All the Look Down! posts have been published on the day I took the photo. All of them have been on the pavement. I constantly debate with myself about the wisdom of posting “Wisdom” outside those rules, MY rules. “Real Love Ahead” wasn’t taken on this day and the message is scrawled across a wall, not laid down on the pavement. This time expediency got in the way of the rules. Plus, I loved this hopeful message lurking near the light as you emerge from a long, dark tunnel. Sometimes, you just gotta break the rules.

“Indispensable Wisdom on the Pavement”: At first I thought I recognized this serene being as the Buddha. Weren’t his elongated ears and “third eye” the give away? But the baldness stumped me—I had only seen Buddha portrayed with a top-knot of hair.

Buddhists consider a properly-rendered Buddha image not to be a representation, but the actual spiritual emanation of the teacher. Much like Byzantine icons (13th Century Shock & Awe), a Buddha image carries supernatural powers. Each attribute of his image symbolizes something specific in the Buddhist doctrine.

The typically elongated ears denote Prince Siddhartha’s noble origin; they are also are a reminder of all that the prince renounced to become an ascetic and a symbol of the power to hear things other people could not. The extra eye references the Buddha’s all-seeing nature. The top-knot is a symbol of renunciation. In this lies the clue to this Buddha.

After seeing the apocalyptic Four Signs, Prince Siddhartha decided to renounce his worldly life. He fled the palace on horseback in the dead of night. At the edge of the Anoma (Illustrious) River, he cut off the top-knot of his long hair and tossed it to the heavens, crying ” “If I am to become a Buddha, let it stay in the sky; but if not, let it fall to the ground.” And that’s why Buddhist monks undergo a symbolic head shaving during ordination.

So, though he’s a bit non-traditional for Buddha depictions, I think he squeezes by the iconography as The Buddha of the Renunciation.

“Indispensable Wisdom on the Pavement”: The whole Palin thing put me into a frenzy of emailing, reading, listening, and thinking. By the beginning of this week, I was nearly desperate; it was beginning to look like the country really might be stupid enough to elect this nincompoop. But the storm clouds broke yesterday, and attention shifted away from the Palin factor and onto more important economic issues. This message on the pavement was just the reminder I needed.

“Indispensable Wisdom on the Pavement”: I was having trouble finishing a difficult post on Buddhism this morning, so I took a walk to clear my head. Fate led me on a path took me by Buddha on the Pavement. He told me not to worry, in time my post would be finished.

“Indispensable Wisdom on the Pavement”: The second ideogram stumped me, but I guess it represents a drop of blood. Literally, this reads a drop of blood for a drop of oil, but more poetically “the blood of humans (soldiers) for a gallon of gas.”